Damon Hill opines on how Red Bull’s 2022 stacks up to Mercedes’ domination of the early hybrid era
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Red Bull RB-18 (L) | Mercedes F1 W05 Hybrid (R)
Red Bull won their first F1 constructors’ title since 2013 this season, and 2022 was rather reminiscent of their ‘dominant’ years in the early 2000s, before the regulation changes of 2014 put Mercedes firmly on the top step, for 8 consecutive seasons. They won 17 races this season, but Damon Hill thinks they weren’t quite as dominant this year as Mercedes was in the past.
Red Bull won 17 out of 22 races, with Max Verstappen winning 15 of those. When directly compared with Mercedes’ first three years of domination: The Silver Arrows won 16 races in 2014 and 2015 (out of 19 races, on both occasions) and 19 out of 21 in 2016. 17 out of 22 is ‘only’ 77.2 percent, while Mercedes won 84.2 percent of the races in 2014/15, and 90.4 percent of the races in 2016.
At the start of the season, Ferrari seemed rather level on performance with them (better on some occasions). Even though the Maranello team’s title challenge faded away in a storm of reliability failures and strategic missteps, they were not really running at full performance for a large part of the season. They had to turn down the engine due to fears about it failing, in order to nurse it through races.
Stacking up Red Bull’s dominance against Mercedes, Hill said: “I was talking with Andrew Shovlin [Mercedes trackside engineering director] about this before the race and I made that point it’s not quite as dominant. Their dominance is not quite as dominant as Mercedes’ shift to the hybrid era. And they were so dominant, they had to kind of underplay it a little bit because otherwise people would have ganged up on them.”
Also Read: Ferrari’s Jock Clear points out Red Bull’s ‘Muhammad Ali’ approach that gave them the edge in 2022
Damon Hill: Ferrari were ‘pretty’ close to Red Bull
Ferrari had the ‘best’ car for a number of races in 2022 and for most of the season, weren’t far behind on qualifying pace, even if they had to run the engine lower and were out-developed by Red Bull. But during the races, especially in the second half of the season, the F1-75 ate its tyres, while the RB-18 and the Mercedes W13 really came alive.
While Red Bull dominated most race weekends, there were some exceptions even in the latter stages of the season, such as Austria and Brazil. Remarking on this, Damon Hill said: “But Red Bull, you see at the end of the race, Ferrari weren’t too far away from them at the end. We don’t know how much more they had in hand, but they were pretty close to Red Bull and also, of course, in Brazil, you had Mercedes being competitive in a different set of circumstances.”
Red Bull were also docked 10 percent wind tunnel time, which should, on paper, help Ferrari and Mercedes close the gap. It’s fair to say they won’t be as dominant in 2023, simply based on chance. But it’s hard to say who would be their closest challenger, even if it ‘should’ be Ferrari, but they are in a period of upheaval with a change in team principal. A three-way title fight is also possible.
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Aniket Tripathi
(1002 Articles Published)